He simply advanced through slides, each one a small ordinary document — an invoice, a map, a login record — and the accumulation was what buried Zane, the sheer patient weight of it, page after page saying the same thing in the same flat administrative language: you took what wasn’t yours, and you left a trail, and here it is.

He had spent years being the loudest man in every room, and now the room was answering him in the one register he could not shout over, the register of evidence, which does not care how important you think you are.

I watched the fifty faces in the grid and saw the moment each of them understood that the audit was not a formality and their colleague was not going to charm his way out.

Nobody looked triumphant.

Mostly they looked the way people look at a car accident — grateful it wasn’t them, and quietly resolved to check their own expense reports that night.

He shot to his feet, knocking his chair back.